Given that face-to-face selling often results in communications breakdowns, it’s no wonder that artificial intelligence (AI) programmers are designing solutions that enable machines that help sell by sensing customer emotions. These AI solutions are able to use cameras and listening devices to determine if a customer is happy or sad, angry or disinterested, and alter their sales pitches based on that assessment.

Given the ever-increasing influence of hundreds of business-review sites that have popped up on the web, retailers need an organized way to monitor and respond to trash talk and other comments about them that appear online—or face potential peril.

Online marketing experts say that you’ll get the most from your e-commerce site if you ensure it has the top features consumers are looking for. Here’s how to ensure your site has what it takes, according to top online marketing consultants.

You can significantly spike visits to your e-commerce site with clever promotional campaigns, which can generate intense fascination for your product or service on social media. As you’ve most likely seen, such campaigns can go viral and attract millions of visits to an e-commerce site. But even those that are less influential can still bring buyers and increase sales at your site.

Businesses looking to keep visitors glued to their websites and other digital properties with interesting content—including social-media posts, articles, images, videos, podcasts and more—are finding relief with auto-curation tools. Such solutions can be programmed to automatically search out and grab excerpts of interesting content, summarize and repackage them as original posts, and then port the results in a pleasing format to the company’s website, blog or even a social-media account.

Businesses looking to automatically generate written reports from their databases now have a raft of choices available, thanks to the emergence of writing software that uses artificial intelligence (AI). Such AI-generated writing solutions can drill down into company databases and automatically produce easy-to-understand written reports, unearthing insights about trends and company performance that might otherwise never see the light of day.

Businesses are realizing significant savings by securing their legal advice virtually—over the web—rather than meeting with attorneys who charge expensive fees by the hour.

In a marked shift from previous years, hackers are much more likely these days to be bent on stealing your computing processing power than embedding ransomware or other malware in your network, according to a March 2019 report from IBM (www.ibm.com/security/data-breach/threat-intelligence). That’s because it’s much safer for hackers to simply steal your computing processing power over the internet—and use it for mining crypto currencies such as Bitcoin—than to get involved in planting other criminal software on business and corporate networks, according to the report’s authors.

Long established as an easy way for businesses to generate referred sales from other websites, affiliate marketing has only gained in popularity in recent years, bringing in significant pay-for-performance sales. One of the primary reasons the marketing concept has remained so popular is its simplicity: Encourage websites to post links advertising your product or service, then pay them a small commission for each sale they generate.

Getting customers to take the time to write a glowing review about your business often takes some cajoling, but as most businesses know, the payback is substantial. Online reviews have become the de facto arbiters of what’s cool, what’s not, what’s worth paying for, and what’s worth running away from. It appears that they’ll only become more influential in the coming years.